Mysterious Object at Noon

Dokfa nai meuman

Synopsis

In this semi-documentary, Apichatpong Weerasethakul provides an original portrayal of his fellow citizens. Battling food vendors, a boxer addicted to TV, a pious policewoman and a loveless rubber-tree tapper each contribute to a serial narrative.

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The capper for me, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s debut film, Mysterious Object at Noon (2000), is not at all perfect — it can’t be, because life and time and people are imperfect, and because the film itself tries not to be a real film at all, fiction or doc… Weerasethakul’s unique wabi-sabi sensibility, as meta as it is embraceably humane, is here in utero, and his film is a brand-new thing, porous and undefined, open to accident and whim.

Weerasethakul’s Mysterious Object at Noon dispenses with color entirely, but that shouldn’t suggest a downward step in visual detail; the director’s 16mm black-and-white long takes linger on screen for minutes at a time before cutting to the next shot, asking us to encounter them in all of their shape and depth.

Critics greeted its arrival on the festival circuit in 2000 as they might have a UFO sighting. Mysterious Object was disorienting equally for its out-of-nowhere inventiveness and for being rooted in a very specific place and culture. Thailand had been largely off the radar of even the most seasoned festivalgoers. But coming from anywhere, this thoroughly unpredictable shape-shifter would have qualified as sui generis: part road movie, part folk storytelling exercise, part surrealist parlor game.